Millennials, Trust, and the Rapidly Evolving Customer Experience

“The world is too large for us. Far too much is going on…Science is pouring its findings over us so quickly that…[t]he human being cannot cope with much more than this.”

The speed of technological change has always left people breathless, as evidenced by the above words, which first appeared in an 1852 edition of The Atlantic Journal.[*]

But today’s pace of change is different by a whole order of magnitude from what our great-great-grandparents faced during the Industrial Revolution. Today every generation gets exposed to a new revolution in computer and interactive technology, and because of this technology we are far more tightly connected than ever before.

The result? Customer expectations today increase at a rate that is almost faster than technology’s hockey-stick curve itself, as people share their customer experiences – both positive and negative – with others. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the aspirations of younger customers and the increasing demands they put on the businesses they buy from and work for.

Having grown up with personal computers, social media, smartphones and apps, the Generation Y and Z consumers who we now often (and erroneously) lump under the catch-all “Millennial” label are far more likely than their parents were to seek out careers that are based in large part on social goals, from solving environmental problems to correcting injustices or helping the disadvantaged.

And both Gen Y and Gen Z are completely intolerant of businesses that they perceive to be more concerned with their own profits than they are with solving their customers’ problems or contributing to the general improvement of society. This has raised the customer-experience bar for all businesses – not just online vendors, but brick-and-mortar retailers, phone companies, financial services firms, technology companies and everyone else.

Importantly, Millennials have come to expect businesses to treat them with fairness and honesty – basically, the way a friend would treat a friend. Anything below that standard is completely unacceptable to them. And a trusted companion would never sell their friend more than he or she needed, just because the friend didn't know any better. Nor would they take more money from a friend by imposing a charge when the friend isn’t paying attention. Any true friend would always insist on having another friend’s back, watching out for anything that might not be in their friend’s interest.

Sadly, this is not yet the way most businesses operate, even today. Most businesses still don’t deliver this kind of proactively trustworthy customer experience because in the 20th Century world of mass marketing they didn’t have to. Even today, many companies’ outdated financial metrics categorize these kinds of proactively customer-friendly activities as costs, rather than as the investments in future customer value that they really are.

But take heart everyone because, as the great Max Planck famously said of scientific progress, businesses improve their customer experience "one funeral at a time."

[*] See Magnus Lindqvist’s book Everything You Know is Wrong.